State and repression (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In December 2025 a military court in Yekaterinburg sentenced five members of a Leninist study circle including a pensioner, from Ufa, the capital and largest city of Bashkortostan, Russia, to between sixteen and twenty-two years in prison. Their activity was as a study group specifically reading Lenin’s State and Revolution. No acts were committed or violence planned, but they were sentenced for terrorism and plotting a coup. Thought alone was treated as a seditious act.

In the US at Texas A&M University, a philosophy professor was barred from teaching Plato because he allegedly advocated particular views on race and gender. Two-thousand-year-old texts, including Aristophanes’ myth of the split humans and Diotima’s reflections on love, are no longer permitted to be read . Students were treated not as thinkers but as ideologically empty vessels.

Two hundred courses in the Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences have been flagged or cancelled by university leaders for gender or race-related content as the university undertakes its review of all course syllabi, faculty members told Inside Higher Ed. This review is required as per new rules instituted by the university Board of Regents after conservatives waged a harassment campaign against faculty members who taught race or gender-related subjects.

As Gyorgy Lukacs wrote, ‘Ideology functions effectively only so long as it remains unconscious of itself.’ When ideology is exposed, it must be defended by force or ritual. Lenin had observed that ‘the State is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.’ Both the Russian state and the university act to preserve the dominance of the master class, only telling truth when it’s convenient.

Plato’s dialectical method encourages dialogue, reflection, and contradiction. Gramsci noted in the Prison Diaries that the master class secures dominance by shaping civil society and consent. The repression of readers and students prevents the proletariat from thinking independently and undermining hegemonic authority.

Such systems do not defend meaning. They defend the conditions of their own performance. They are nihilistic not because they believe in nothing but because they cannot tolerate the process by which meaning is made.

Paranoid ideology and its violent political theatre

A woman was shot in the head three times by an agent of the United States in front of her wife. This was violent ideological theatre, not law enforcement. On January 7 in Minneapolis an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, a poet and a U.S. citizen, during a federal immigration enforcement operation that had already brought thousands of armed agents into the city.

The federal response was instantaneous and unapologetic. Homeland Security officials and President Trump rushed to frame the killing as a response to ‘domestic terror’ and defend the agent’s actions as self-defence, claiming Good ‘weaponised’ her vehicle and tried to run down officers. Local officials, video evidence, and human rights groups reject that narrative; footage and eyewitness accounts show her attempting to drive away, not attack, and the domestic terror label has no basis in law. The FBI immediately seized control of the investigation and cut out Minnesota state investigators, deepening mistrust and raising fears of a cover-up. The killing has sparked large protests in Minneapolis and solidarity demonstrations nationwide, and it has intensified debate over ICE, federal power, and accountability in law enforcement.

The political response to this isn’t a botched PR afterthought like the Met’s handling of the Mark Duggan or Jean-Charles de Menezes shootings, where Blair and Cameron let police take the heat and preserved an appearance of separation of powers. This is different. Trump and his cabinet turned a street killing into ideological propaganda, weaponising it against large parts of the working class and their allies, and signalling that dissent and community defence will be cast as terrorism. That escalation, and the fact that a significant slice of U.S. society is willing to accept these justifications without evidence, tells us something grim about the shape of social conflict under Trump’s second term, conditions that eerily echo the pre-Civil War debates over Bleeding Kansas, where political violence became embedded in national policy and identity.

A.T.

Editorial: Iran’s cry of the oppressed (2026)

Editorial from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

People, shot by live ammunition, too terrified to go to hospital for fear of being arrested. Body bags spilling out of mortuaries onto the street. ‘Security’ forces extorting the equivalent of 6 years labourer’s annual wage to return the dead to their families. 18,000 protesters arrested, some facing summary execution. A total communications blackout, forcing some to walk hundreds of miles to border areas to get information out.

As this goes to press the Iranian government, undaunted by Donald Trump’s bluster, says it has killed around 2,500 protesters, but if they’re admitting to that figure, the real toll might well be far higher.

Some protesters were apparently hoping for the return of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, son of the hated former shah, who had been energetically trying to stir up Iranian public opinion from his safe home in Washington DC. That was seen by most media pundits as an unlikely, even farcical proposition, and one too monstrous for anyone who remembers the brutal repression of the shah, before the advent of the mad mullahs. But the alternatives, civil war or else a military coup, didn’t look attractive either.

The Iranian people only want what anyone wants, to be free to live decent lives. In pursuit of that modest aspiration they have repeatedly shown a level of personal bravery that commands a heartrending respect. ‘Sometimes parents go to the protests and don’t come back,’ explained one mother to her two young children, shortly before she too was killed by police gunfire. ‘My blood, and yours, is no more precious than anyone else’s’.

They have never stopped fighting the theocracy, and they probably never will. Within just two weeks of the 1979 revolution, women were out on the street protesting against the new mandatory hijab, which followed ‘a ban on alcohol; the separation of men and women in universities, schools, pools and beaches; and limitations on broadcasting music from radio and television.’ More protests came in 1992, ’94 and ’95, then a massive one in 1999 following closure of a liberal newspaper, then in 2007 because of petrol rationing, and again in 2009-10 due to what many saw as a rigged election. More protests followed in 2011 in solidarity with Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere, and later in 2017 over the cost of living, and 2018 over water shortages. Most recently in 2022, months of protest followed the alleged judicial murder of Mahsa Amini, arrested by the ‘morality’ police (as if they knew the meaning of the word) for failing to wear a headscarf. In all these protests, the police went in with guns blazing. Hundreds were killed, thousands arrested, and many executed, including by hanging from cranes in public places ‘to deter others’.

The regime may cling on for now, and the more it crumbles, the more viciously it will oppress its own people. Its leaders – and its army of police thugs – know what will happen to them if they finally lose control. They won’t expect mercy, and they damn well won’t deserve any.

Slaughter in Gaza, slaughter in Ukraine, slaughter in Sudan, in Myanmar, and now in Iran. Dozens of armed conflicts elsewhere. When does it ever stop, in capitalism? The tragedy is that it never will, until we bring an end to the competitive market system which sets humans forever against each other, just so that a tiny few can profit.

The Butcher of the Commune. (1909)

From the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is a lie—their Priests, their Pope,

Their Saints:—their . . all they fear or hope

Are lies, and lies …”

Had Robert Browning’s victim of the Inquisition lived in our own time she could have added “their Press” to her list of lying agents. The truth of this is never more clearly seen than on the occasion of a popular military “hero” shuffling off this mortal coil.

On July 8th, at his house in Paris, expired General the Marquis of Gallifet, Prince of Martigues, etc., at the advanced age of 79. This old Bonapartist scoundrel, referred to by capitalist journals, both French and English, as “Famous French Fighter,” “Friend of King Edward,” “Great loss to France,” etc., etc., was in reality an unscrupulous and abandoned wretch, who, by his cold-blooded murders at the time of the Commune, earned the undying hatred of all who hold dear the cause of working-class freedom.

As Socialists we cannot fail to be struck by the wonderful and significant unanimity displayed by the organs of Capital on both sides of the Channel, when estimating the dead “hero’s” character.

Thus the Daily News, peaceful persuader and mouthpiece of reform, whilst lightly touching on his “severe repression in 1871,” gave due prominence to “his services to France.” The Petit Journal of July 9th wrote as follows :

“Eccentricities of character could not justify the story of executioner in civil warfare. It is said he took a fiendish pleasure in butchering conquered federals who had fallen into his hands. No trustworthy evidence of any weight has ever come to light to support these accusations, against which he was always unwilling to defend himself; finding that, as he himself once wrote in a letter, ‘to apologise would be wanting in elegance’ !”

No trustworthy evidence !

The Commune was dead. The last barricade had been captured and its brave defenders either massacred or taken prisoners.

The special correspondent of the Daily News (how “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”) whilst searching for appropriate “copy” amongst the barricades, had the misfortune to fall in with Gallifet’s soldiers, who, despite the fact that the pressman held a pass from the Versailles Government, forced him to join a herd of unarmed prisoners.

These poor wretches were being marched from Paris to Versailles.

The description by this eye-witness of the scenes on the road has often been quoted.

“The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrich, and was drawn up, four deep, on the footway, facing to the road. General the Marquis de Gallifet and his staff, . . . dismounted and commenced an inspection from the left of the line. Walking down slowly and eyeing the ranks, the General stopped here and there, tapping a man on the shoulder or beckoning him out from the rear ranks. In most cases without further parley, the individual thus selected was marched out into the centre of the road, where a small supplementary column was thus soon formed. . . It was evident that there was considerable room for error. A mounted officer pointed out to Genera! Gallifet a man and a woman for some particular offence. The woman, rushing out of the ranks, threw herself on her knees, and, with outstretched arms, protested her innocence in passionate terms. The General waited for a pause, and then with most impassive face and unmoved demeanour, said : ‘Madame, I have visited every theatre in Paris ; your acting will have no effect upon me’ (ce n’est pas la peine de jouer la comedie) . . It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, or uglier than one’s neighbours. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing his speedy release from the ills of this world to his having a broken nose. . . Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes afterwards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for over a quarter of an hour. It was the execution of these summarily convicted wretches.” Daily News, June 8th, 1871.

This description was deemed worthy of a leading article on the next day. The following is a brief abstract:

“. . For the touch of M. de Gallifet’s fingers meant death. The appearance of the unfortunate men and women who were thus singled out for execution is described as being something horrible. One already wounded, his shirt soaked with blood, sat down in the road and howled with anguish . . . others wept in silence ; two soldiers, presumed to be deserters, pale but collected, appealed to all the other prisoners as to whether they had ever seen them amongst their ranks. . . The huddled mass of corpses which was subsequently seen by several horror-stricken correspondents showed where M. le Marquis had passed.”—Daily News, June 9, 1871.

From the “Manifesto of the Working Men’s International” we take the following:

“The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in cold blood ; . . . Gallifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National Guards, with their captain and lieutenant, surprised and disarmed by his Chasseurs.”

Does the Petit Journal want any further evidence ?

Our message is to the working class. We bid them to remember that at all times the powers that be are determined to maintain their supremacy by every means in their power. If they cannot gull the workers by political cheating, lying and chicanery, they are prepared to shoot down men, women and children by thousands rather than surrender one jot or tittle of their beloved “rights of property.”

Like every other class in the course of history, the ruling class came into power by means of the command they held of armed force. When we have sifted and winnowed out the chaff of “comforts of religion,” “respect for law and order,” “adaptability.” and all the other canting phrases beloved of labour niisleaders we find that the ultimate appeal is to force. Ignorance plays a great part in helping to keep the workers in subjection, but it is by force the “super” class hold their position. We must consciously organise therefore for the capture of the armed forces in order to convert them from an instrument of oppression into an agent of emancipation. Let this “consummation devoutly to be wished” once become a fact, then those brave souls who perished in the Commune will not have died in vain.

Fritz.

Remember Soweto? (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that the headlines have died down over the recent riots in Soweto, South Africa, and the press vultures are picking over some other gory carcass, it is worth a look at what the Johannesburg Star had to say before the outbreak of riots.

In an article on 14th June 1976 it described Soweto as ". . . just a huge agglomeration of people living without many of the accepted amenities of urban life. Physical security, schools, decent sanitation, and roads, electricity, proper shopping and recreational facilities . . ." In other words, a massive shanty town for “probably well over a million people” (i.e. black workers). Since last year, when the Johannesburg Star had another article on Soweto “matters have not improved”. The cauldron could well have boiled over earlier.

The real concern of the paper is revealed in the last paragraph of the later article:

Can any government in its right senses allow this drift towards disaster to continue? Even if you leave human compassion right out of it and simply consider the huge potential threat that is building up here to the security of everyone. White as well as Black?

The capitalist class are always willing to “leave human compassion right out of it”. What they are concerned with is “the security of everyone”, specially themselves. You can’t have the workers going round rioting, stealing and destroying property; they might start bringing these reactions into the factories and other places. Workers must respect property. The capitalists must keep the lid on and maintain law and order “at all costs” as Vorster emphatically pointed out.

The tragic lesson of Soweto is that the capitalists will unhesitatingly use the state power when they think their interests are threatened. While we abhor the conditions under which the South African workers are forced to live, the solution does not lie in abolishing apartheid but in the recognition by all workers that their common interest lies in the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism throughout the world.

T. K.

Black Liberation - George Jackson and Political Violence (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1960 when George Jackson was eighteen, he was convicted of second-degree robbery for driving the getaway car whilst his friend robbed a petrol station of 70 dollars. For his part in this offence he was sent into the state prison system with a sentence of “one year to life”. Technically, George Jackson was liable to imprisonment for life. In practice it meant that he would serve a minimum of one year and would thereafter appear annually before a parole board who would consider his “fitness to be released”.

The preface of the book Soledad Brothers — The Prison Letters of George Jackson states: “Under this system parole is granted on the basis of the prisoner’s record within the prison, but the prisons themselves are brutal humiliating places where violent racism is commonplace; if a black prisoner resists this degradation he will be penalised and lose parole. Jackson was denied parole year after year. His friend was released in 1963.”

In January 1970 after Jackson had been in prison for ten years, seven-and-a-half of them in solitary confinement, three black prisoners who were at exercise in Soledad Prison and known to be political activists were provoked and shot dead by a prison guard. The guard was exonerated as having committed “justifiable homicide”. Shortly after this was announced, a white guard was thrown to his death from a tier of the prison where Jackson was held. He and two others who came to be known as the “Soledad Brothers” were charged with murder and faced the death penalty.

In August 1970, Jackson's younger brother Jonathan held up a Courthouse and took a judge amongst five hostages under the demand “Free the Soledad Brothers”. In the ensuing violence, both Jonathan and the judge were shot dead. In August 1971, in circumstances which have never been made clear, George Jackson was amongst a group of persons which included prison guards, who were shot dead in prison. Subsequently his co-defendants on the murder charge were acquitted.

This record of violent events which built up over eleven years against the developing political consciousness of its victims exemplifies the crude viciousness of modern American barbarism. These events cut right through the American hypocrisy and its pretensions to be the egalitarian “land of the free". They expose with murderous clarity a system where privilege is maintained by ignorance, hatred and brutality as a conscious instrument of social policy. The prolonged incarceration of George Jackson and his eventual destruction was rooted in the entire fabric and structure of American capitalism. It is both convenient and popular to see his imprisonment and death in isolation from the whole social and economic context, as something unrelated to the general pattern of society. In reality the privileges of the American rich and their monopoly of wealth and power are erected on the squalor of the American poor and where necessary, without hesitation, on the atrocity of a George Jackson’s death.

There are Crimes and Crimes

By any standards, George Jackson was a remarkable individual. He was brought up in the black ghettoes of Chicago and Los Angeles. His family background was not political. His father was a conscientious person, ill-educated himself, struggling hard as an unskilled worker to provide for his family in material surroundings typical of the unrelieved ugliness of those urban slums. This is an atmosphere which produces cynicism as a brittle response to the glaring inequalities of life. These areas after all are the concentration camps for those who are socially and economically rejected, patrolled and held down by armed policemen, and when necessary, the national guard.

More than most, American capitalism glamourizes the ownership of things and accords prestige to personal wealth. At the same time, the opportunities of millions of Americans are restricted by the economic and social conditions of the urban ghetto. In these circumstances, it is difficult for young men to avoid hostile encounters with the police. Like many others, George Jackson was one such young man, and at eighteen, found himself in prison for theft.

The general aim of the state prison regime in America is, through the application of physical and psychological terror, to force the inmates to passively accept their rôle in American society. The aim is to reduce the individual to a state of despair and insignificance. As Jackson himself put it:

This is in keeping with the overall prison conspiracy, i.e. you have no will, you have no choice or control, so be wise — surrender. There’s a sign everywhere your eyes may happen to rest, begging: 'O Lord, help me to accept those things I cannot change.’

With a sentence of “one year to life” for petty theft, the authorities combine two savage pressures. The first is the day-to-day punishment of imprisonment combined with physical assaults and personal humiliation. The second is the blackmail in saying “this year provided you behave, you may be released on parole, or next year” or the year after that, and so on for life.

George Jackson’s crime was not that he complied in the theft of 70 dollars, but that in prison he could not accept the ignominious terms on which the authorities might have released him. For this crime he was imprisoned for eleven years, seven-and-a-half in solitary confinement, and eventually in August 1971, shot to death.

Short of Understanding

In prison, in spite of the limitations of his personal background, Jackson began to read seriously, gradually seeking an explanation for the forces, social and historical, underlying his plight. Eventually, he devoured such left-wing and Marxist literature as he could get hold of. Jackson did not become a Socialist. It is doubtful whether his views would fit neatly into any political category. He became an inspiration to the civil rights movement in America, and also to the Black Power movement. Although there is much that is perceptive in Jackson’s views as expressed in The Prison Letters of George Jackson, his understanding of economic relationships and social and political institutions, fall short of a Socialist understanding. If George Jackson was anything, he was a black nihilist.

Jackson claimed to be opposed to capitalism. “The principal enemy must be isolated and identified as capitalism.” “Our enemy at present is the capitalist system and its supporters.” However, closer analysis would show that in fact what Jackson was opposed to was American-style private enterprise. Jackson sympathized with China and the emerging African states. So he ignored the fact that capitalism is a world mode of production where the means of wealth production are monopolized and controlled either by private owners or a political bureaucratic élite. In world capitalism, although the systems of administration in different states vary, basic economic relationships are essentially the same. This applies to China and the emerging African states. Wage labour is exploited, wealth takes the form of commodities marketed with a view to making profit and capital is accumulated by a minority from the surplus wealth produced by the working class. Moreover, in China and Russia, as much as in America, the capitalist system is held down by a State machine which includes the armed forces and police and prisons.

Jackson considered that political democracy was a fraud. “Of what value is quasi-political control if the capitalists are allowed to hold on to the people’s whole mode of subsistence?” He believed in leadership and elevated violence. “The people who run this country will never let us succeed to power. Everything in history that was of any value was taken by force.”

Futile to Confront

There is no doubt that if in some time of crisis Jackson’s views on leadership and violence became practical action, this would lead to disaster. It would compound crisis with death and violence with no possible hope of getting anywhere towards Socialism. The most that might be achieved on the basis of an immediate worsening of conditions would be that the political controllers might change. Modern history is littered with examples of political power being changed through violent means. But all these examples relate to States where capitalism is undeveloped. Without exception the replacement governments have all embarked on the continued development of capitalism. In the real world where capitalism dominates as a mode of production there would be no other practical alternative. In states where capitalism is more developed, political administration is stabilized either through a state capitalist regime such as Russia, or through political democracy as in Western Europe; in either case the chance of a militant minority confronting or replacing the government through violent means is nil.

The principal facts are these, that in the complex organization of modern industrial States, no government is viable unless it rests upon at least the acquiescence if not the general support of the majority. This would apply to any militant minority attempting to wrest political power. Apart from the difficulty of defeating the existing State machine in open confrontation, they could never hold power because their writ would not run. The only practical test of whether the exercise of political power is possible or not in a developed capitalist State is the degree of acquiescence or support a government can carry.

Apart from this, any movement which is going forward on a basis other than democratic action cannot be a Socialist movement. The equality that Socialists aim for is not only the equality of all men about the means of producing wealth but equality in all the processes of social organization.

Get it Right

The crucial factor which allows the establishment of Socialism is the conscious action of a majority of Socialists. Until there exists a majority of Socialists, only capitalism is possible, regardless of the form of its administration. When that majority is achieved, then it can be assumed that the establishment of Socialism will be politically straightforward.

What Jackson ignored was the regrettable fact that capitalism in America rests upon the political support of the whole population, including the millions of negro voters. His call for violent struggle may well have been an expression of his bitter frustration, but as a useful idea in creating a better world, it was a political irrelevance. It was a mistake stemming from a faulty reading of Marxism for the Black movement to draw inspiration from Chinese state capitalism. Significantly, they are not enthusiastic about Russia, yet there was a time during the earliest phase of the state capitalist revolution when it enjoyed sympathy amongst protestors throughout the world. Just as the capitalist nature of the Russian state has become more obvious year by year, it is inevitable that the same development will take place in China.

The Black Power movement will have to learn that negro workers can only achieve their emancipation along with the emancipation of all mankind.

Pieter Lawrence

Guns and coffee in El Salvador (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the defeat of the American-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, the American ruling class has been concerned that the testing-ground for the “domino” theory would shift from Southeast Asia to its own backyard, Central America. Would Guatemala and El Salvador be the next countries to instal new rulers who were less well-disposed towards the US? In El Salvador, in particular, massive American military aid is being used to maintain in power a ferociously repressive junta.

Since the late nineteenth century, El Salvador has been a leading coffee grower and exporter. In the 1880s, with the help of conveniently passed laws, Indian communities were uprooted from their land and large coffee plantations were formed. Many former peasants became seasonal workers on the coffee estates, able to find employment only between November and March. Since 1930, there has been much urban industrial development, largely in the form of capital-intensive export industries owned by US corporations such as Exxon, Texaco and Westinghouse Electric. But El Salvador remains a predominantly agricultural country.

It is also a land of great poverty and inequality. The entire economy — agriculture, finance, industry — is dominated by a tiny elite of fourteen families. Two per cent of the population controls over sixty per cent of the cultivable land. At the other extreme, only one peasant family in twenty owns enough land to support themselves, while on 1974 figures over forty per cent of urban wage-workers were earning less than the legal minimum of around five pounds a week. About half of El Salvador’s infants die of malnutrition or related ailments before their first birthday. Such is the status quo the American government is defending, to the tune of ten million dollars in 1980-1.

For half a century El Salvador has been ruled by one military dictatorship after another. In 1930, in the midst of the world depression, the candidate of the reformist Labour Party was elected President, only to be overthrown by the army in the following year. In 1932, after the so-called Communist Party had won some local elections, the generals refused to recognise the result and a large-scale peasant uprising took place. It was put down brutally: between twenty and thirty thousand people were killed (equal to between one and two per cent of the total population!). Since then, the government has been in the possession of a series of different factions of the army and the fourteen families, with some mock elections but no political democracy. Since 1960, many peasants have been won to support of the the regime in power by means of a rural paramilitary body known as the National Democratic Organisation, or ORDEN. Its members were helped to avoid the worst poverty by means of such “favours” as special credit terms, preference in employment, or extra health care. ORDEN members acted as informers against suspected subversives in the villages. Thus many potential opponents were recruited as bulwarks of the government.

The Christian Democrat Party was founded in I960. In 1972 their presidential candidate was deprived of electoral victory by yet another army coup. By this time, guerrilla organisations were being formed in the countryside, aimed at resisting ORDEN and, in the long run, at taking over the government themselves. Besides ORDEN, there are other pro-regime terrorist groups ranged against the guerrillas. In addition, there is a veritable plethora of “left-wing” opposition groupings of various kinds, religious, political, trade-union, student. Since April 1980, these have come together in the Revolutinary Democratic Front (FDR).

The current Salvadoran government came to power in a coup in October 1979, when the Christian Democrats and a section of the army overthrew the existing military regime. The new junta promised “radical reforms”, and set up a cabinet involving civilian ministers. However, it immediately proclaimed a state of emergency and banned meetings of more than three people. Clearly the junta was not even superficially different from—let alone better than—the outright military dictatorships that preceded it. By the end of 1979, the junta w.as openly backing its own terrorist organisations. In 1980 El Salvador entered a period of civil war. On the one side were the army and the other state-run terrorists (supported and trained by the Americans) and on the other the guerrillas, backed by opposition movements and, supposedly, supplied with arms by Cuba. In the first nine months of 1980 alone, five thousand Salvadorans were killed in the fighting.

What are the two sides fighting for? The government and the army are defending the existing order and the interests of the present ruling élite, the Salvadoran capitalist class, and the American companies who own much of Salvadoran industry. The American military aid is designed to protect the massive profits of these US companies, and to defend America’s strategic interests in Central America. The guerrillas are a nationalist movement, fighting against United States control of the Salvadoran economy and government, and aiming to establish Salvadoran state capitalism. This is apparent from an examination of the “Programmatic Platform of the Revolutionary Democratic Government”, issued in February 1980 by the Revolutionary Coordinating Committee of the Masses, the umbrella grouping of guerrilla organisations.

The platform calls for widespread nationalisation of the banking and finance system, of foreign trade, of electricity distribution, of petroleum refining. It is stated, though, that “None of this will affect small or medium-sized private businesses, which will be given all kinds of stimulus and support in the various branches of the national economy”. There will be an agrarian reform, and the tax system will supposedly be transformed “so that tax payments no longer fall upon the workers”. (As taxes are a burden only on the capitalist class anyway, this transformation is difficult to envisage.) There will be wage regulation, price controls, increased social services, no unemployment . . . It all sounds quite impressive, till you realise that you’ve heard it all before from politicians elsewhere, and that the supposed benefits of nationalisation never quite permeate to the workers. State-run enterprises will still be concerned with making a profit and the platform admits as much: “the state will receive substantial income from the activity of the nationalised sector of the economy”. They will still be subject to the ups and downs of the world markets, in coffee for instance. As elsewhere, nationalised industries will be concerned to keep profits up by keeping wages down, and to discharge workers when what they produce cannot be sold profitably.

The workers and peasants of HI Salvador have nothing to gain by supporting the opposition groups or guerrillas, who will simply become their new rulers and exploiters. The platform we have discussed aims at no radical transformation of society: it envisages the continuation and further development of capitalism in El Salvador, a society of haves and have-nots. The change will be in the personnel of the ruling class, and a change from private to predominantly state capitalism. And that makes no difference to anyone but the capitalists themselves.

Paul Bennett

Woe to the Vanquished! (1957)

From the January 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the early years of the Bolshevik régime Lenin and his associates constantly referred to the Commune of Paris of 1871. They eulogised the defeated Communards and pilloried the murderous victors as examples of Capitalist ferocity that will never be forgotten.

Recent events in Budapest bring the Paris Commune to mind again on account of the similariities between the two tragedies.

In September, 1870, after the defeat of the French armies and the capture of Napoleon, Paris was invested by the Germans and a four months siege commenced. In Paris a Republic was proclaimed and the National Assembly, headed by Thiers, appointed themselves as the Provisional Government and declared their intention of defending Paris to the end. Instead of doing so, however, they were privately parleying with the German Government, arranging for peace terms, including occupation of Paris by the Germans. 

As a new elected Government gave no practical sign of their claim to defend Paris the Parisians became restive and eventually an angry mob invaded the Town Hall, frightening the Government with their conflicting demands; some wanted a Committee of Public Safety, others a Revolutionary Commune similar to the Commune of 1793 in the first Revolution.

Eventually the Government left Paris and took up their residence at Versailles under the protection of the German Army. In Paris delegates were elected by universal suffrage and a Commune was formed in March, 1871, for the purpose of defending the city and bringing about a number of reforms in the administration of affairs.

The newly appointed Government at Versailles then arranged with the German Government for the release of a portion of the French Army to be used for the capitulation of Paris. The German Government was a willing party to the proposal of Versailles because, under the peace terms, Germany was to get a huge war indemnity and the rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Without the capitulation of Paris the peace terms could not be implemented. So the German Army were cynical onlookers, and held the side-lines, whilst the French Army, smouldering from recent defeats, was let loose upon its fellow countrymen.

The Communards, or as many called themselves, the Communalists, were a mixture of many outlooks; from simple nationalism to anarchism and the supporters of the International Working Men’s Association. The defence was badly organised, many mistakes were made, but the self sacrificing and heroic resistance of the people of Paris was almost unbelievable. When the ramparts were overwhelmed they fought from street to street in despairing heroism, sacrificing their lives for their beliefs.

When it was all over the Versailles Government entered upon an orgy of slaughter that had rarely been witnessed before. We will quote a description from a writer who was not favourably disposed to risings like the Commune, Godfrey Elton. This is what he writes in his book The Revolutionary Idea in France 1789-1871 (Edward Arnold and Co., 1923).

 “By the 28th [May] all was over: guns, cartridge boxes and uniforms littered the gutters of the poorer quarters, while in the doorways sad, stony-eyed women waited chin on hand for the men who would not come back: and elsewhere more elegant Parisiennes could be seen trilling with excited laughter as they raised the covering with the tips of their parasols and peered at the faces of the dead. The vengeance of the Party of Order was comprehensive and very dreadful, more dreadful than the vengeance of the Revolution had ever been, even in 1793; the shooting of men, women and children in hundreds and without trial was a massacre, not an execution, and not a few of the victims were buried before they were dead.

“All over Paris huge piles of corpses encumbered the streets and poisoned the air. The cemeteries of Paris could not receive a tithe of the butchered. Enormous ditches at Père Lachaise, Montmartre and Mont-Pamasse and the trenches of the first siege at Charonne and elsewhere absorbed the unhonoured corpses, while women, widows and mothers, peered hopelessly among them for the dead that had been theirs. When the task of burial became too onerous they were burnt in the open air. It seems probable that 20,000 were killed during the few weeks immediately following the victory. The figure is unparalleled; in modern European history almost unimaginable. And the martyrdom of the prisoners was more dreadful than that of the executed; there was probably between 40,000 and 50,000 of them; and among them more than a thousand women and seventy children under fourteen ; and the barbarity of their treatment can only be matched in the East; one must look to the Black Hole of Calcutta or to some of the Armenian massacres for an approach to the brutal savagery of the conquerers ” (pages 171-172).

There is much more, but we have quoted enough to give a picture of what happened during and after the Paris rising. Many of the Parisians made their escape, some to England.

Now let us come up to date, to what happened in Budapest. Here again the mass of the people rose in revolt against their Government and the presence of foreign troops—the Russians. Here also a people of mixed outlooks were united in demanding the overthrow of the existing Government. The Government called in the aid of the Russians but there was a difference this time owing to changed circumstances. Whereas the Germans in 1871 were content to hold the ring, for the time being at least, the Russians came in with massed tanks and engaged in an orgy of slaughter, instructed by the Government that had claimed unswerving sympathy for the Communards of old. At the time of writing the fighting appears to be almost over but the pursuit and hanging of the vanquished continues with unabated brutality, and the refugees are giving their pitiful stories to the world. How deeply the Hungarians felt is shown by their attitude “Victory or death, bloody struggle or extinction.”

In Karl Marx's book on the Commune, The Civil War in France, he concludes with these words:

 “Workingmen’s Paris, with its commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them."

The early Bolsheviks glorified the Commune but the wheel has turned full circle and the glorifiers are now the damned, painted with the same red brush as the exterminators of the Commune. We can also say of them that history has nailed them to an eternal pillory from which all their apologists will not avail to redeem them.

Working men and women who have mistakenly given their support to these false Communist Parties should take thought of this historical parallel and shake themselves free from their clay-footed idols. Stalin is dead but the brutal fake Communism continues.

Gilmac.

Death (in prison) of a guerrilla (2021)

From the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September the ex-Maoist guerrilla leader Abimael Guzman died in a prison in Peru where he had been for nearly thirty years. He has been portrayed by the Peruvian and world press as one of the most criminal and brutal ‘Marxist’ leaders in the world, blamed for the death of more than 80,000 people and the destruction of private and government property

He was the founder of ‘Gonzalo Thought’ (after ‘Mao Zedong Thought’) and he created his own cult of personality, seeing himself as one of the ‘four swords’ of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He travelled to China in 1966 and 1967 during the Cultural Revolution and was part of a split from the Communist Party of Peru (Red Flag). Mao’s Little Red Book became his Bible. When he returned to Peru, he formed a guerrilla group called Shining Path with some of his professors and young students who came from peasant families,

The name Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) was taken from José Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian Marxist-Leninist who had founded Peru’s first Communist Party in 1928 and who advocated a peasant/indigenous people’s ‘socialism’. His maxim was: ‘El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución’ (‘Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution’). Many political movements were inspired by his writings including the Tupamaros in Uruguay and Evo Morales’ indigenous peoples’ movement in Bolivia. Three ex-leaders of these guerrilla movements later became presidents in Latin Americas and allies of the ruling class and the corporations.

Was Guzman really a communist? Was he a Marxist? Were Mao and Lenin genuine Marxists and socialists? Are Leninism and Maoism valid socialist/communist currents? Can the crimes that were committed by Guzman and Shining Path be blamed on Marxism and socialism?

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement have said for decades that Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism have never been Marxist or socialist conceptions; that, instead, they were representative of an economical current described by Engels as State Capitalism; that the concept of a violent uprising was a tactic created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government of Russia, an idea borrowed from the French Blanquists. It was not a Marxist conception. Shining Path’s first action was to attack a polling station and burn it down, in defiance of Marx’s insistence on the political education of the working class, the revolutionary use of the ballot, and universal suffrage among the working class.

In Latin America Maoism was a complete failure from the first, having been adopted by several organisations that had abandoned Castroism. It sacrificed the lives of many young people who became members of the urban guerrillas and infiltrated themselves into workers’ unions, or went to the mountains or jungles of several countries in Latin America and were assassinated by the police or the armed forces, along with many peasants and members of the workers’ unions, university teachers, and young professionals.

Maoism’s failure in Latin America is a clear indication that a minority group of individuals will not liberate the working class and humanity. It suggests that Marx was correct when he wrote that only the working class can liberate itself. Maoism was a tactic, earlier criticised by Engels, of a conscious minority acting in the name of an unconscious majority. But socialism cannot be established without a class-conscious working class

Mao Zedong Thought attracted many young people in different countries in Latin America including the Caribbean islands as an ideological replacement for Castroism, but in essence it was the same adventurist programme advocated by Regis Debray who had been in Bolivia with Che Guevara. The main attraction was the concept of ‘anti-revisionism’ started by China and Albania against the ‘Khruschevites’. It claimed to be a restoration of true socialism and true Marxism, but it was just a variety of Leninism and Stalinism. Maoism was Chinese nationalism, just as Castroism was Latin American nationalism.

Latin American Maoism was basically a nationalist/patriotic movement, and all the so-called Communist parties that were created were nationalist parties of the countries where they were formed. None of them had a socialist programme; their programme was for reforms, statism and the nationalisation of natural resources.

It was mainly a movement among young people and university students. It never had any support among the industrial working class. Although many Marxist-Leninist parties sent their best cadres to work with the peasants, it never became a peasants’ movement; it was capitalist governments that provided the peasants with what they wanted – land reform, agricultural equipment and supplies. They confronted a force which was stronger than them, the forces of the capitalist state, and suffered the consequences.

When China openly opted for state-run capitalism and collaboration with Western powers and Western corporations, all these organisations collapsed and disbanded themselves. Some of their leaders were killed or deported; others later became government ministers. The USA wanted them to leave and provided visas for them to emigrate, but they were no threat to capital and to capitalist society; they were anti-imperialists, but they were not anti-capitalists.

The new government of Peru refused to bury Abimael Guzman’s body, citing so-called national security. So his body was cremated and the ashes scattered at a secret location. Maoism and Shining Path are no longer popular within any section of Peruvian society nor a threat to security. At first they had some support within the peasant class, but then the peasants were caught in the cross-fire between the Maoist guerrilla fighters and the government’s armed forces and many were killed. Maoism is a dead movement in Peru today. Most of the members of Guzman’s group became part of some gang or drug trafficking.

Many of the deaths blamed on Shining Path and Guzman were not committed by them. The police, the paramilitary and the armed forces should be blamed for most of the killings, like most of the killing committed in Colombia in the fight with the Maoist/Castroist guerrillas known as the FARC – another group which is not socialist or Marxist, as the media alleged. Being connected to and armed by Cuba does not make a group socialist. Nor were the Tupamaros in Uruguay a socialist or Marxist movement (one of their ex-leaders later became president) but were more like a Robin Hood movement, taking money from the rich to give to the poor.

Maoism in Latin America showed its terrorist and anti-working-class nature, and was a total negation of the revolutionary nature of Marxism and socialism. It was only the capitalist press and the anti-communists who labelled Guzman and those like him ‘Marxist’, just as they did with FARC.

Maoism could not have been applied in developed capitalist countries like the USA, Britain, or Germany. It was basically a theory for a peasants’ movement, similar to the Russian anti-Tsarist Narodniks who, similarly, had no support among the peasants and ended up using terrorist tactics. It could only be applied in Third World countries, but even so was a complete failure in all the economically backward countries where it attempted to take control of the nation and the state apparatus. It turned out not to be a shining path to anywhere.

Marcos

Pathfinders: Eye to eye (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eye to eye

The recent Guardian exposé (19 July) concerning Israeli company NSO and its Pegasus phone-hacking software is only the latest in a long line of media revelations about government surveillance. One can no longer be surprised by this sort of shenanigans. Of course governments watch people of interest to them. Ruling elites have always had their spy networks for keeping an eye on enemies from without and enemies from within. It’s an unwise ruler who fails to keep themselves sufficiently informed, as Julius Caesar found out.

NSO says that the Pegasus software, which monitors your location and can secretly activate your camera and microphone, is only for tracking criminals and terrorists. But of course they would say that. An investigation by Amnesty International and others revealed that human rights activists, union officials, journalists and lawyers have also been targeted. One journalist in Mexico, whose number appeared on a leaked Pegasus list, was assassinated at a carwash after, it’s believed, being tracked there via his phone. NSO won’t say who their state customers are but they are known to include Mexico, India, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

What other countries might be customers? Pakistan, surely, and Burma, given that India is. If Saudi Arabia and the UAE are on the list, then Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Syria probably are too, demonstrating incidentally that the Arab-Israeli ideological divide which incites poor workers to kill each other is of no concern when it comes to businesses making lots of money. Other countries probably don’t need Israeli software. Belarus almost certainly gets its hacking tools from Russia, as North Korea will from China. Five Eyes, the intelligence group of the ‘Anglosphere’ that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, no doubt has its own sophisticated spyware, indeed might well have provided the Israelis with the tech expertise to develop Pegasus in the first place.

The obvious concern for workers everywhere, and for anyone who wants to see a better society supersede capitalism, is that government surveillance could become so powerful and all-pervasive that independent critical thought and deed become impossible.

When you look at some of the more authoritarian or unstable countries in the top 25 global economies, it’s easy to believe that this is indeed their ultimate aim. China is obsessed with totalitarian control freakery despite having given up any vestige of its so-called communism years ago in a bid to become the world’s top capitalist economy. Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s, is run by gangsters who have made murdering journalists and political opponents almost an Olympic sport, as have Mexico and Saudi Arabia. But what about other countries in the top 25, such as Australia, Canada, the US, Switzerland, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc? Flawed to be sure, but as capitalist democratic freedoms go, these states score fairly high, with little outward sign that they are bent on creating Orwellian dictatorships.

They probably could do it, technically speaking, if they wanted to. Some, like the UK, have granted themselves the legal powers for almost unlimited surveillance, and the tools for the job already exist. Nowadays you don’t need armies of red-eyed, chain-smoking spooks listening in on phone calls. You just need AI plugged into the cable and satellite feeds. Even so, round-the-clock surveillance of an entire population would be a huge drain on money and resources, and would it represent a good return on investment given that 99 percent of the population don’t do anything interesting?

It depends how paranoid you are. Some regimes are so dodgy they have every reason to be paranoid. Needless to say, all capitalist states feel the need to be eternally vigilant, however for the most part, they are likely to be more judicious in their focus, keeping a weather eye on individuals and groups deemed dangerous but in general letting the population go about its business.

It’s easy too for individuals, especially angry and radical dissenters, to get themselves caught in a feedback loop of confirmation bias regarding state surveillance, and become convinced that Big Brother is staring at them out of every CCTV, phone screen and laptop webcam, and that everything that happens, even in a pandemic, is part of some dark design by the deep state. How far any of this is justified or based on objective reality is a matter of debate, but unfortunately rational debate tends to fly out of the window when paranoia comes knocking at the door.

Whistleblowers like Julian Assange are held up as evidence of deep-state conspiracies, and certainly their treatment by vengeful governments can be appalling. But if state control was really as strong as some people think, how did these individuals manage to blow the whistle in the first place? And why is it that states and their politicians seem to conduct their affairs in a way that is so often confused, chaotic and incompetent, a fact made very obvious during the pandemic? Are these devious Machiavellis just pretending to be idiots, or are they what they appear to be, venal mediocrities with little idea what they’re doing? What kind of deranged global plan would include runaway climate change, now thought to be causing record heat levels, forest fires and catastrophic flooding? Is the simpler explanation not the more likely one, that capitalism is out of control and its leaders clueless?

Lose the ability to wield Occam’s Razor and you can lose your bearings. Once, at a socialist meeting, a visitor asserted that there was no point doing anything because the whole world was mind-controlled by a giant media conspiracy. When socialists asked him how come, in that case, we were free to hold a socialist public meeting, his reply was ‘You’re in on it too.’ That’s a cave-dive down a very deep rabbit hole.

Still, it’s understandable that a lot of radical political activists worry about state surveillance. If it’s not happening now, they argue, it soon will. If you try to downplay this concern, perhaps by suggesting that any large-scale suppression of legitimate working-class activity would create more problems for the state than it solved, you can be seen as naïve. Conversely, we suspect that activists sometimes overestimate how ‘dangerous’ they really are. In any case, the more secretive you aim to be, the more the state will take an interest in your affairs.

So, all things considered, the Socialist Party conducts its political activity in plain sight, with open public meetings, because it’s a democratic organisation that seeks change by democratic methods, and you can’t be democratic from the shadows. The best way to challenge the legitimacy of capitalism is, we think, to be legitimate yourself. Instead of trying to avoid the state’s gaze, we meet it, eye to eye, and wait for it to blink.

Paddy Shannon

Dirty War in Colombia (2006)

From the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers in Colombia are amongst the poorest in the world yet live in an area rich in natural resources. Colombia’s complex and on-going war between the government’s armed forces, drug producers and traffickers, leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries, with blurred distinctions between each side, continues. Trade unionists, students, activists, journalists and those accused of collaborating with any side in the conflict are potential victims, not just combatants. This is not only a civil conflict, for following the globalisation of capital we see the globalisation of the means of defending capital: war.

In the late 1980s the Andean Group of governments further liberalized investment regulations to ease the repatriation of profits from foreign investments and to allow a greater foreign involvement in the national economy. This led to the Andean Pact free trade agreement in 1992. The most recent figures show that free-trade capitalism has done little to benefit workers in Colombia. World Bank figures show that the national poverty rate declined from 65 percent in 1988 to 64 percent in 1999. According to the FAO, the number of undernourished people in the population decreased from 6.1 million in 1990-92 to 5.7 million in 2000-02. If this is the World Bank’s current motto of ‘A World Free of Poverty’ in action, then Colombians will be waiting several decades before they even have enough food to eat in a country with the some of the richest natural resources on the planet.

In the late 1980s, when Colombia began to attract British capital, Margaret Thatcher sanctioned military assistance to Colombia’s notorious armed forces. This assistance continues to this day. Despite the efforts of journalists and activists, the British government refuse to disclose the full amount and nature of all the military assistance given to Colombia’s armed forces. It is known that British military officers have trained their members in the UK as well as in Colombia. The UK government has also aided the Colombian government to set up the National Intelligence Centre a co-ordinating body for the Colombian security forces. The UK government has also sanctioned arms sales to Colombia; indeed Colombian delegations have attended the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition (DSEi) in London and Farnborough International Airshow at the invitation of the Ministry of Defence. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued arms export licences to the value of £3.5 million in 2004. The British government can refuse to allow export of arms, for example, on the basis of risk of use for internal repression, risk of contributing to internal tensions or conflict in the recipient country or the preservation of regional stability. Perhaps the case of Colombia is an administrative oversight.

US security assistance amounted to $98 million in military financing, $1.7 million for military training and education and $474 million for counter-narcotic operations in the 2004 financial year. Corporations are also thought to make donations to the Colombian military.

The US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004 state that members of the security forces continued to commit serious abuses, including unlawful and extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Also police, prison guards, and military forces mistreated detainees in harsh, overcrowded and underfunded prisons. State security forces were responsible for 124 extrajudicial killings during the first six months of 2004 and at least 17 of the 65 cases of forced disappearance. Victims are often portrayed as guerrillas killed in combat.

One of the controversial aspects of US-funded counter-narcotic operations involves the eradication of coca and opium poppy plantations by aerial herbicide spraying. The US Department of State’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs reports that 2004 was the fourth consecutive record-breaking year of aerial eradication: 136,500 hectares of coca and 3,061 hectares of opium poppy were defoliated. The use of broad-spectrum, non-selective herbicides means that not only is coca and poppy production affected but also food crops, pasture and forests, to say nothing of the possible effects of large amounts of herbicide on livestock and humans. The illicit crop eradication programmes have simply meant that new areas are brought into cultivation. The result is that the increasing destruction of immensely diverse natural forest as farmers are displaced by removal of their means of living and by poorly targeted spraying. Some compensation is available as part of the eradication programme but is inadequate when set against the losses, and not enough to act as a disincentive to further planting of illicit crops.

Commentators have suggested that US-funded counter-narcotic operations are little more than an attack on the financial supply lines of the guerrillas. Quoted in the New York Times last year, a spokesperson from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said ‘Key indicators of domestic cocaine availability show stable or slightly increased availability in drug markets throughout the country’. It seems that the eradication programme has had little effect on the supply of cocaine within the USA.

The Caûo Limùn oilfield in the Arauca region, which accounts for 30 percent of Colombia’s oil production, has seen some of the greatest violence in recent years. A pipeline which pumps oil to the Caribbean for export has been a major target for guerrilla forces seeking payment for not sabotaging the pipeline. The 18th Brigade of the Colombian military which is funded and trained by the US government and an oil company has been accused of abuses against civilians and of co-operation with paramilitaries. Health workers, trade unionists, teachers, journalists and activists as well as members of displaced peasant communities who lived near the pipeline have been victimised by the both the military and paramilitaries.

The US State Department and Amnesty International both state that despite the near impunity with which military personnel carry out atrocities, they continue to fight a ‘dirty war’ by collusion with paramilitary groups. The extent to which this occurs is unclear, reports vary from the merely sharing intelligence to paramilitaries and the military being trained, transported, armed and fighting together.

Paramilitaries were responsible for numerous violations of international humanitarian law and human rights according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. There are approximately 12,000 paramilitary fighters in Colombia, mostly members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a coalition of paramilitary groups. Though officially the AUC is demobilising and announced a ceasefire in 2002 more than 1,800 killings and disappearances have occurred since then. Paramilitaries were responsible for at least 304 of such killings during the first six months of 2004, including journalists, activists, trade unionists, indigenous leaders, local politicians and others who threatened to interfere with their drug trafficking activities or those suspected of collaboration with guerrillas. There are also reports that paramilitaries continued to commit ‘social cleansing’ killings of prostitutes, drug users, vagrants, and the mentally ill in city neighbourhoods they controlled.

One of the most well publicised aspects of paramilitary killing in Colombia in recent years involved the Coca-Cola company. SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian food and drink workers’ union, claim that members and their families have been abducted, tortured and murdered by paramilitaries hired by the management of Coca-Cola bottling plants. With no means of redress in Colombia, the union with the help of the United Steel Workers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund attempted to bring a case against Coca-Cola in Florida under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act. The court found the Colombian government complicit with the paramilitaries but absolved Coca-Cola of responsibility as the bottling companies were separately owned, despite Coca-Cola then being the major shareholder in the company. The union’s case against the bottlers is unresolved. Since the beginning of the case SINALTRAINAL have called for an international boycott of Coca-Cola products.

The paramilitary groups and guerrillas have their roots in La Violencia, the war of 1948–1957 between supporters of the oligarchic landowners and supporters of a liberal state and land reform. At the end of La Violencia several independent republics existed within Colombia. The armed forces of the state, supported by the US military, took these areas by force. From one of these republics known as Marquetalia, the creator and future leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) emerged with a small band of guerrilla fighters to continue to fight against the official parties who had now formed a power-sharing coalition. It was later that they aligned themselves with the Colombian Communist Party (PCC). FARC and the PCC severed links in the late 1980s. However, despite the differences between Marxism and the PCC’s Leninism, and the obvious discrepancies between FARC’s openly stated political programme and that of Marx, FARC and the smaller pro-Cuban National Liberation Army (ELN) are often referred to as ‘Marxists’ in the popular press. In fact, FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

FARC and ELN members were responsible for a large percentage of civilian deaths attributable to the armed conflict according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. FARC are thought to be responsible for hundreds of intentional killings and have injured hundreds of civilians with bombings and land-mines. FARC also kidnap, torture, and murder off-duty members of the public security forces. Both FARC and ELN kidnap hundreds of civilians to help finance their activities. The Colombian Presidential Programme for Human Rights reports that from January to November 2004, the FARC killed at least 99 persons in massacres. Guerrillas targeted local elected officials, candidates for public office, religious leaders, suspected paramilitary collaborators, and members of the security forces.

The war in Colombia reminds us that we are living with a globalised capitalism. The war is of a global nature and not just a domestic war. Tragically most workers still look to a beneficial national government for amelioration of their conditions. However, as long as the social conditions of capitalism exist, and minority ownership of the means of production and distribution, competition to be that minority will all too often turn to war. Be it the benevolent liberal democratic state with a mixed economy, or the free-market economy or a government of nationalized industry free of foreign influence, this has ever been the case. World socialism will destroy the social conditions that create poverty and war.

Piers Hobson

Editorial: The Socialist View of the Situation in China. (1925)

Editorial from the August 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present disturbances in those of China occupied by foreign settlements may be said to have had their immediate origin in a strike which took place in February last. Chinese workers employed in Japanese textile factories in Shanghai protested against the ill-treatment of a girl who was seriously injured by a Japanese foreman. Her offence was that she was found asleep after a twelve-hour night shift. The strikers demanded that fines and personal violence of this kind be abolished, and a 10 per cent, increase of their wages. The strike appears to have been unsuccessful, but even so the employers failed to keep the terms of settlement.

In May this and many long-standing grievances led to a general strike movement in Shanghai, and feeling was quickly inflamed by the death of a striker at the hands of a Japanese factory official. On May 30th a number of Chinese students paraded in protest after having been forbidden to do so by the police. Some students were arrested and the remainder demanded their release. Shanghai police in the charge of a British inspector were then ordered by him to “shoot to kill” only 10 seconds after he had announced his intention to the few bystanders who were near enough to hear his words. The result was that 6 were killed and 40 wounded. Within 6 days the victims in the ensuing riots numbered 70 dead and 300 wounded —all Chinese.

The movement rapidly spread to Hong Kong, Canton and other industrial and commercial centres, being added to and made more complex by the race hatred of British, French, Japanese and other foreigners who have at different times occupied Chinese territory and maintained their occupation by force, in spite of the opposition of Chinese governments. It has been easy enough to induce the strikers to believe that their enemy is the “foreigner,” because the majority of the factories happen to be foreign owned. There is actually, of course, no question of the Chinese exploiter being any less brutal in his treatment of his employees than are his alien rivals. The abominable conditions which prevail in the foreign mills—as bad as those common in this country in the early days of the factory system—are equalled, if not surpassed, by those in Chinese establishments in and outside the foreign settlements.

The foreign settlers, backed by their respective governments, are thus threatened by two quite different but at present associated movements—by their Chinese employes, who want better conditions, and by the propertied and educated Chinese, who burn with hatred of the foreign invaders and demand independence. They resent their position of political and social inferiority and (most intolerable of all the burdens a would-be ruling class can be made to bear) they have had to suffer the indignity of seeing the proceeds of the exploitation of Chinese workers pocketed by European and Japanese capitalists. The first principle of patriotism in China, as elsewhere, is that robbery, like charity, should begin—and end—at home.

For their part the foreigners are by no means more than superficially united. Great Britain arrived early and obtained the best ports and most extensive spheres of interest, and now in consequence has to face the hardly disguised hostility of the late arrivals who seek to gain commercial and financial advantage by other means than those adopted by Great Britain. Thus Russia and U.S.A. both go out of their way to pose as friends of China. Russia has already relinquished all special privileges in China, and America chooses this moment to announce that it foregoes the last instalments of the Boxer indemnity. American missionaries supported the policy of their Government by giving evidence on behalf of the arrested Chinese students, while British and others were defending and glorifyingf the brutality of the British controlled police.

As for the disturbances, we are familiar enough with the customary violent and hypocritical attitude of the European ruling classes towards their workers not to be surprised at the use of similar methods in Shanghai. All the blame was as a matter of course laid on the Chinese students and “agitators,” but little by little evidence has accumulated which badly damages the pretensions of the guardians of “law and order.”

In the demonstration the only casualties were Chinese; two out of three doctors stated at the trial that the wounds were nearly all in the back, which would be inexplicable if the crowd had been attacking the police; the third doctor said, “I am not sure whether the bullets were shot from the back or the front.” (Daily Herald, July 21st.) The judges found “that there was no violence or indication of violence, that most of the arrests took place before the shooting. …” The students were all acquitted. The Commission appointed by the diplomatic body blamed the police and recommended the dismissal of those responsible (Daily Herald, 22nd July). This finding has been overlooked or suppressed by most of the Press.

The recent movement is, however, only a symptom of a change which coming over China—the change from a static peasant system to an aggressive and progressive capitalism.

“China is passing through the first phases of the industrial revolution. … In the seven years from 1915 the number of spindles rose from one to two millions.”—” Manchester Guardian,” 19th June, 1925.

A propertyless industrial working class is massing and slowly learning to organise against vile factory conditions and low wages. Whether they will or no they are being brought into dependence on world capitalism, and they will in time take their part in the struggle for the overthrow of that system.

Unfortunately this critical phase finds them overwhelmed with interested parties offering them bad advice, anxious to divert them into various blind alleys.

The Chinese capitalists, the Communists and the Labour Party are all “friends” of the Chinese worker. If the Chinese workers are led to support the Chinese capitalist independence movement, experience will soon teach them that nationality means nothing whatever to the workers ; their lot will be no degree better if and when their exploiters are all Chinese.

The Communists’ willingness to deceive other people is only equalled by the ability to deceive themselves. They disregard the fact that at present only a small fraction of China is industrialised, they slur over the Capitalist aims of the independence movement and urge the workers to support anti-working class political groups to fight issues of no moment except to Chinese capitalists.

What they cannot or do not wish to see is plainly visible to others. The Chinese representative in London of the “Sin Po” (Batavia) writes as follows in “Foreign Affairs” (July, 1925):

“China, a land of conservatism and tradition, of peasant proprietorship, is the worst imaginable ground for the sowing of Marxian ideas. China being so vast, it is not surprising that in certain parts of the country the extreme Left wing of the Kuomintang is Communist ; but the body of the organisation is bourgeois and capitalistic with the mediaeval capitalism (“distributism”) of Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Let not Europeans be deceived by their newspapers: the present trouble in China, in so far as it is political, is a manifestation of nationalism in which merchants and bourgeois join with workers and students to resist foreign exploitation.”

The British Labour Party and Trades Union Congress have passed resolutions of sympathy protesting their solidarity with the Chinese workers. How little their socialist understanding and how little the value of their sympathy is shown by the fact that on 25th May the General Council sent a deputation to the President of the Board of Trade

“To protest against the continued employment of Chinese and cheap Asiatic labour on British steamers. The deputation asked the Government to introduce a Bill to make illegal such employment west of the Suez Canal.”—” Daily Herald,” 26th May.

The industrial workers of China are few at present. They should organise and work to defend their class interests on the economic field against capitalists irrespective of nationality, and prepare for the future when conditions will have been prepared making working class emancipation possible through Socialism.

Ireland — they died for nothing (1994)

From the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why should I want to go back   

To you, Ireland, my Ireland? 

The blots on the page are so black  

That they cannot be covered with shamrock. 

I hate your grandiose airs, 

Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger. 

Your assumption that everyone cares,  

Who is the king of the your castle.  

Castles are out of date, 

The tide flows round the children's sandy fancy; 

Put up what flag you like, it is too late  

To save your soul with bunting.

So wrote Louis MacNeice in his finely anti-nationalist Autumn Journal. The same sentiments of contempt for the futile excitement of national folly were echoed in great plays such as Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey and The Hostage by Brendan Behan (revived recently in a superbly anarchic production by the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Now that the Ulster dust is settling and, in the words of one Irish politician, inaction is speaking louder than words, it is surely time for some reckoning to be done. Was it worth it? The bloody years of furious castle-building, which have left few castle-dwellers and no shortage of occupants for the slums and the cemeteries, were either necessary or they were in vain. Socialists say that they were pointless: that for workers to die for flags and anthems is to die for nothing.

First, the accounts — the inventory of the dead and destroyed. Before the British Left sloganise about the IRA’s heroic struggle and Bostonian bar-room rebels play remote-control murder with their pocket books, let us do a few necessary historical sums. Who has died and for what? Since the commencement of the current “troubles” in 1969 over 3,200 Northern Irish people have been killed. This is in a population of less than a million. The proportional equivalent in American terms would have been half a million political murders: ten times the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. 37 percent of those killed were shot directly: another 30 percent were killed in gun battles, cross-fire and ambushes; 24 percent died in bombings; just over 5 percent of the catholic dead were victims of the British army. Nearly 35,000 Northern Irish people have been victims of serious injuries, ranging from lost limbs, blindness, bullet wounds and brain damage. This amounts to almost one in fifty of the population. Since 1973 1,500 kneecappings and so-called crucifixions (being shot in the elbows as well as knees) have been carried out by the IRA and their mirror reflections in the loyalist terror gangs. Those who were so punished had no court of appeal at which to defend themselves. Many of those escaping such attacks are now in exile in Britain and elsewhere.

Barbaric inhumanity has not been the preserve of the terrorists. The British army, assisted by the RUC, and backed up by the laws designed to facilitate freedom of the state against the people, have carried out vicious beatings, strip-searches, shoot-to-kill exercises and sustained torture in their political prison camp at Long Kesh. These crimes are not inventions, but have been exposed and condemned by bodies ranging from Amnesty International to International Court of Human Rights. How many workers have been pushed into the arms of futile terror gangsterism by anger engendered by the military arrogance of the British state? It should not be forgotten that the soldiers killed while serving in Ireland, whose deaths have been counted as victories in IRA pubs from Belfast to Boston, were exclusively working-class men, usually drawn from the dole queues, often Liverpool or Glasgow catholics.

Statistics can blind their magnitude and, anyway, the prejudiced will refuse to be confused by mere facts. So let us ask some searching questions which involve times, dates and human faces, not just numbers. What liberation was served by the murder of two boys in Warrington last year when an IRA bomb ended their short lives? What defence of Irish culture was served by such reckless vandalism as the bombing of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast (a famous repository of Irish social history) or the murder some years ago of an old man whose reputation as a maker of instruments for traditional Irish musicians was destroyed when two IRA men shot him dead because he was a protestant? What freedom was being canvassed when socialists in Belfast attended a Sinn Fein meeting on the Falls Road and, after asking a question which confronted the rhetoric of nationalism with the reality of class, were threatened and forced to leave?

We socialists opposed unreservedly the broadcasting ban upon Sinn Fein and Co, but what of their ban on the right to speak out against them which has led to threats, beatings and kneecappings in the name of liberation? These are questions calling for answers; We do not expect to hear them from the Irish-American know-nothings or the slogan-chanting SWPers whose logic-defying position throughout all of this has been to give “unconditional critical support” to the IRA. But let those who have any genuine belief that blowing up workers is a means to freedom tell us how they answer these questions, or how they seek to evade the historical commitment to do so.

Message from America
During the last presidential election Clinton, in a bid to win Irish-American votes, promised to send a peace envoy to sort out the little mess in Ireland. Perhaps Ireland should have responded by offering to send Gloria Honeyford to clear up the riots in LA. The entire US involvement in Ireland has been motivated by cynical vote-seeking. When Gerry Adams was first invited to visit New York in early 1994 politicians seeking their share of the 40-million odd Irish-American votes were falling over one another to shake hands with this fascist. When Adams and Kennedy shook hands perhaps they swapped notes on their respective victims. Then Bruce Morrison, a man defeated for political office, was sent over to Belfast with Clinton’s blessing, to carve out a deal with Sinn Fein. The deal involved a promise of hundreds of millions of dollars of US capital investment in the north-east of Ireland. But what will these American capitalists be investing in? Not folk music sessions and the leprechaun-making industry, that’s for sure; they will only invest their money where there is a low-waged, disciplined workforce to be exploited.

On this recent visit to America Adams was treated as if he should be compared with Mandela. The truth is that Adams and his party, Sinn Fein, do not represent very much at all. Over 98 percent of voters in the Republic of Ireland do not vote for Sinn Fein even though they are quite free to do so, while in the north 90 percent of voters in general and 70 percent of catholics do not vote for Sinn Fein. So, the principal significance of Gerry Adams lies not in his mandate, but in his capacity to murder and mutilate.

While in the USA Adams spoke in Cleveland where one member of the audience, John O’Neil, asked him whether he regarded consent as being fundamental to any democratic political settlement and whether Sinn Fein was prepared to oppose the Irish constitutional link between church and state. Adams declined to respond to the points raised, instead offering some empty rhetoric about how the Americans were to be praised for throwing off British imperialism. (He failed to utter a word about American imperialism.) One catholic-nationalist in the audience turned to another and was heard to declare, “That fellow O’Neil must be Protestant.” “Worse than that”, was the response, “he is a Marxist!” So much for the radicalism of Sinn Fein’s US supporters.

The American government pretends to reject terrorism. Of course, they carry out legalised campaigns when they see it as being in their national interest, but they claim to oppose unofficial and unelected political killers. But with what credibility can Clinton's government rebuke armed terrorists, be they Bosnian Serbs or Libyan hijackers, when they have made it clear that the best way to obtain a hero’s welcome in the USA is to bomb your way to credibility? Who will take seriously American bleating about the nasty bombers of the World Trade Centre when Bill Clintstone's Barney Rubble, Al Gore, was televised shaking the hand of a man whose sole claim to power rests upon his association with precisely such tactics?

As ever, the myth of the New World Order rests upon the miserly economic and sordid political interests of a rich and privileged minority. The catholic and the protestant slums of Ireland north and south will never be served by such political game-playing.

The futility of Nationalism
From its inception, Irish nationalism was motivated by a kind of stupidity (“the delirium of the brave” as Yeats called it) which workers should not have touched with a barge pole, let alone a flag pole. Consider the words of nationalist nutcase and IRA hero Padraic Pearse, a leader of the Easter 1916 rebellion, who rejoiced at the sacrifice of Irish lives in the great imperialist war of 1914-18:

  Ireland has not known the exhilaration of war for over a hundred years . . . The last sixteen months have been the most glorious of Europe . . . The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for the love of country.

What benefit has any wage slave ever gained from a war grave? Even if there is to be a united Ireland, what possible gain does any worker expect to be offered by membership of a semi-clerical state in which citizenship amounts to no more than freedom to be exploited for a wage or a salary or unemployed and paid even less welfare money than is offered by the British state? This prospect might lead some fat New York catholic lawyers to dance a jig, but where will it leave the working class?

Both the IRA and the loyalist ceasefires are to be welcomed by all workers. Socialists want a situation under capitalism where we can operate to abolish the system in circumstances where bullets and bombs do not threaten us daily. But now comes the hard part. 600,000 Northern Irish protestants still think they are British and 300,000 Northern Irish catholics (give a few here or there) still think they are Irish. As long as these identifications are considered to be worth a candle there is a prospect of renewed conflict.

So, the merely negative achievement of ending the killing, much as it is to be seen as a step forward, is not where matters must rest. It is now time for workers to reach the realisation that their class identity, as used and robbed providers of profit to a supranational capitalist elite, is what really matters. To defeat this elite globally and not just in Ireland, calls for workers to exhibit the courage to transcend the identities inherited from capitalist history (Irish/British—catholic/protestant) and recognise that as workers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population we have a world to win. It is on that basis that Irish history can proceed from the futility of national rebellion to the exciting opportunity of the social revolution by the many.

Steve Coleman